12/13/2013

StarForge: Update 0.5; Now Available On Steam!

The new update is finally ready. We are very excited to see what everybody has to say about it. Hopefully you all enjoy playing through the content as much as we do. Patch notes regarding the changes can be found below!

New Features

Procedural terrain fully integrated with all game modes Tunnels will now be generated in the ground

Tunnels will now be generated in the ground

Terrain digging!

Use the craftable Drill weapon

Changes are saved

Storage containers are replacing Pallets Resources are stored in a finite stack in your inventory, once you reach your maximum capacity, you must store your resources into one of the storage containers.

Storage containers are not generated automatically. You must craft more if you want to store more.

Store whatever you want inside (by pressing the 'E' key)

Pick them up to move them around (by pressing the 'Q' key)

Chests will now spawn in the environment

Chests will contain either blueprints or weapons. Blueprints unlock crafting for all types of items. Examples: Weapons, vehicles and tilesets.

The player can now craft a bed that allows them to skip to day time

Player is able to place material on the ground using the drill

Use ctrl + mouse wheel to select what material to use.

Enemies have a chance to spawn inside of tunnels, watch out!

Enemies will now spawn at night, seek shelter!

Added basic RPG elements allowing the player to get better at crafting over time

Changes and Improvements

Fort defence has seen significant redesign and balance updates

Improved procedural terrain

Visual improvements to textures

Performance increase

Pallets have been removed

Acquired resources are now stored in your inventory (up to a maximum amount)

Improved ShockTree engine

Performance increase

More intelligent placement

Better transitions between LoDs

Thicker, more varied forests

Added grass/bushes/brush

Trees sway when hit

Trees can be chopped down

New VAT graphics/design.

Tooltips have been added to the crafting screen

Tutorials are now displayed for basic controls

Added a loading screen for while critical content is being generated

Changed how blueprints work

Player no longer starts with all blueprints available

Each game mode has a different selection of blueprints that are available

Player can unlock blueprints during game play

Added custom tile set blocks (ramps + stairs)

Added a beam of light to the vat so the player can find home again

Players can now specify what port is being used in multiplayer (Thank you for pointing this out FritzBox users! <3)

Control Changes

Hold Right Mouse Button (RMB) - Pick up an item on the ground, and place it in your inventory.

These keybinds are temporary, and subject to change. We will let you know if we do.

KNOWN ISSUES

When quitting a game to start a new one, please Quit and Exit the game completely and restart it, because simply quitting to the title screen and starting a game will cause the terrain to act strangely. This is a high priority issue, and will be patched next week.

Sometimes "synced" saved characters can come out of sync, especially when the player is not the server. This can cause many "local" saved characters to accumulate. Recommended workaround is to always load the server version, as it will always work, however the "local" characters will still accumulate.

Multiplayer has seen significant regression in many ways. While it can be played, it may not be the best experience for those who are not hosting the game. This will be improved over upcoming patches.

A few issues I noticed:
Survival:
If you move too far outside of the radius of your base and place structures such as the forge, modifying the terrain can cause it to fall through the surface. A simple fix I found was to place blocks down and then placing the forge on top the blocks.

Reloading old cells sometimes results in dead in appearance trees.

Seeing "holographic doubles". Hardly noticeable, unless I'm playing on my IPS monitor. If you are running on "Fantastic" quality, at least running on my 680, you can see doubles of any 3D object in the game. I can verify this happens with the following:
monsters, to players, structures, etc.
They appear to be shaders that aren't lined up on the models correctly. All I can guess.

The game seems to run much smoother than previous builds. I'm guessing there is a lot of debug code on the geometry modification system because it usually drops a frame for each use of the penetrator.

A.I. Spawns with GREAT amounts. It's terrifying to say the least. There should be a max number of spawns, as well as a timer if they leave a certain radius of the player to despawn, as well as a certain minimum distance to spawn. Also other types than the yellow wouldn't hurt.

Gamebreaking bugs:
I have never seen Iron Ore or Oil in 8 hours of playing. According to Draknor on the forums it exists in VERY small quantities miles below the earth. But he's the ONLY person to have said anything as of yet. As of now, as far as I've experienced, digging STRAIGHT DOWN has yielded no results except unplayable lag as it seems the game does not differentiate Z cells like it does X and Y cells. I'm sure I'd hit lava or a memory limit error before iron at this point. Considering it takes iron ore to make half the things in the game...

Lesser Issues:
No seed for survival...? Same Generation every time?
I looted a chainsaw with a scope on it. What?
Save and Disconnect on a multiplayer game takes you to... The same menu, rather than the main menu. It does successfully end and save the game though.

Some trees on multiplayer do not sync.

If you start a new game and someone joins WHILE the host is starting the server, two of the user will appear in game following one another.

Drill is broken and i have tried reinstalling the game and a new save, new game, new character. completely deleted game tried again still broken. :(
i really liked playing before drill broke.
but great work im having a lot of fun with the game as is.

ease up on the monster spawn and maybe give the blocks more significant resistance because its really annoying trying to build anything in survival. stone blocks and up should be nearly indestructible for fleshy creatures

Maybe for the next update you should add more graphic settings, like Vsync, render distance, texture quality, player quality, mob quality, and item quality. Also maybe make the flash light have a bigger radius because at night it is wayyyyyyyyyyyyy to dark out. I would also love to see doors and thinner blocks so you can make thinner walls for a house/base/building. But other than that stuff you guys are knocking my socks off! Incredible game, great ideas, great everything!

I love you guys <3
I did some intense digging, and got really far down (I was picking up a lot of Iron Ore and Oil) before it began to lag.
The first alien gave me a little fright, I hope you add more to survival. Those aliens are pretty. That not so little glow bug would be funny to find running around as well.
Aaaaanyway you guys have added and fixed so many things and I just wanted to give you an internet bro fist.

you REALLY need to add an option to remove ground foliage because my computer used to run this game fine but now i can't run it now. static meshes would help becasue the trees waving really slows down the game to a slideshow.

first off i wanna say to you guys, INCREDIBLE WORK!! i have actually been waiting for a game like this for a long time. minecraft was the first realization, but you guys have taken it to the next level. HOWEVER...you still have quite a ways to go before this game becomes actually playable. the new update was incredibly productive but incredibly buggy. you just cant save properly. you cant save resources, characters, or land properly without some sort of major glitch whenever you log back in. it might be that you lose your storage container so you cant save resources, the forging terminal keeps multiplying every time you try to play a saved game, the terrain having the same holes in it as the one you played before even though you deleted that game, OR the fact that you cant even dig into the terrain sometimes when you load a saved game. all these bugs are basically game breakers which to me, makes playing the game somewhat pointless when you cant save anything properly. with all that being said, you guys have really done amazing work with what you have accomplished so far and im SOOOOOOOO looking forward to the next update. even though this game isnt complete yet, i am glad i bought it. hope you guys continue working hard at making this game even more incredible.

On my Phenom II X6 tower I can run the game with only considerable lag. 20fps is about average.
On my laptop I can run the game on the lowest settings at 12 fps on average.
Both computers dislike digging deep tunnels.

-Day is so short, and night is so long, repetitive, and dangerous.(Perhaps a peaceful mode for those of us who would like to explore the building aspect of this game?)
-Night is too dark. Radiant lighting would be a good alternative to putting spotlights facing your home.
-Material durability would be good. Why spend fifteen minutes building a castle that can be broken into in a couple seconds? (Maybe only certain super bugs should be able to break hard materials?)

Reading all of this it sounds like you(devs) want too much too quickly. I understand you have high pressure from players who wants to play, and to see your game take shape! My advice though, would be to check and double check this new update, feature updates and make sure everything works for everyone before you start on new things. If you do that, your game will turn out fine. Do it even if we bitch and whine and want more! I think, in the end, everyone will be happy when you release THE perfect game, competing with the big studios.

I disagree with MurderJunkie. Most game devs spend so much time debugging to make everything perfect, that they hardly make any progress with the actual development. Focus primarily on development in Alpha, focus on mix on development and bugfixing in Beta, and focus primarily on bugfixing in final release.

These are my problems:
-Distant trees disappears. Annoying when I take aim for a fat tree and it disappears

-Enemies are quiet and scared me almost everytime, impossible to know where they are without seeing them.

-Very difficult to flatten the ground. It would be nice if one could limit the max depth the miner can mine to the height I am standing on.

-Building blocks. Takes ages to build something. I would be happier if individual blocks built themselves for like 10x the current time, but let me pre-place the blocks I want to place. PLEASE! Either make them build one by one or every single one simultainiously but longer time for individual blocks.

-I need lots of iron ore to craft the good stuff but iron ore is hard to find. I had to dig to -500 meters to find it but then I was disappointed because each tick gave me 1 iron.

-Mobility. I had to go very far to find good things but it turned to night before I could come back. Something like a simple hover-bike with 100 storage for each mat would be very nice.

Things I really liked:
-Caves are awesome! One of the most awesome things I have ever seen in a game!

-Tunnels are awesome! I was excite about seeing what kind of cave it would lead to.

-Chainsaw is really fun to use for cutting wood. The variation of it's sound makes it awesome!

-Enemies are silent. Scared the crap out of me and it was fun. Just give them a little sound at day-time and let them be silent at night :D

-Picking up stuff. Very smooth. Except it caused me to push my tracklight and bed a hundred meter away because my character grabbed it too far.

Suggestion:
-Hover-board
-Closer grab distance
-Less time used for building blocks
-Locking items to where they are, so they can't be moved.
-Forging machine should be able to use materials from nearby storage boxes.

But, as MurderJunkie said, it is better to perfect the terrain system and what not first before adding a lot of stuff.